Building the Applier

The Slink Applier is a basic SL HUD. Once you learn how to make one HUD you know how make any basic SL HUD.

Start by rezzing a cube: Ctrl-B opens the build panel. Left-click the ground/floor. A cube rezzes. Cubes always rez oriented as shown. In SL the positive Y runs north (green), the positive X runs east (red), and the positive Z runs up (blue).

The face of the HUD when attached to the viewer is the negative X side, west side, of the cube. So, you place the textures for a HUD on the west side. All other sides can be blank and 0% opacity. That reduces the render load a tiny bit. The most important render load factor is the size and number of textures used to make the HUD. Best design uses one or a few small textures.

However, for testing we do not need a HUD texture. I generally set the texture to blank for testing. Once you get this HUD working your next one can be fancy.

Name this root cube whatever is meaningful to you. I use Test Nails HUD. It is common convention in SL to name a nails applier as a nails applier… e.g., Awesome Sauce Slink Nails Applier. For HUD’s shorter names are better… but… not critical.

Now we need another cube for a button. The default cube forms at 0.5m. Make the button cube 0.1×0.1×0.1m. Name it TB1. Place it on/in the west face of the main cube.

With the button cube still selected press SHIFT and select the main cube. In the build panel the LINK button will enable/highlight, click it. This turns the two cubes into a linkset, prims linked together. The big cube should be highlighted in yellow and the button cube in blue.

If you use Firestorm you may have to turn on highlighting. Open Preferences and type highlight into the search field. Step through the tabs items until you find the setting: Enable highlighting of selected prims. You’ll find it in: Preferences->Firestorm->Build 2.

In the SL Viewer highlighting is on by default. Make sure the big cube is the root, yellow.

The last item selected is the ‘root’ of a link set.

Now click the tab labeled CONTENT. Copy two scripts into the contents of the root; Authorization [your_avatar_name] and Slink 3^rd Party Makeup and Nails Controller [version release date]. You can Ctrl-C then Ctrl-V to copy paste or drag and drop. Remember. The permissions on these scripts MUST be COPY or TRANSFER.

We are almost done. Now we need to make the setup note card. We need a special bit of information to make the card. We need our nails texture’s UUID, Universal Unique Identifier. Get that by finding the texture in inventory. Right-click it and select Copy Asset UUID.

Now create a new note card in inventory. Right-click in inventory and select New Notecard.

Name it: Slink Makeup Data. These have to be the first 3 words of the name. You can fill the rest of the name field with whatever identifies the card for you. For this one I used: Slink Makeup Data – Test.

We need to type into the note card the information the scripts need to place the texture. The line is in the format of:

[button name],[target layer],[Texture UUID]

Or in my case:

TB1,NAILS,94c24771-36f8-324b-6af1-9fad1753037b

Type in the button name. Type the second field, which has to be correctly typed. Any variation and the applier will not work. For the longer field names copy and paste them from the Slink note cards. But, paste the UUID in while you have it on the clipboard.

This one line will handle finger and toe nails. Your feet and hand HUD’s can affect whether the nails in an applier HUD can apply. Use the hand or feet HUD at some point prior to testing this new applier HUD to be sure all nails are enabled.

Once the card is finished save it. You want a finished copy in inventory. Drag and drop or copy/paste the card into the Contents of the root prim with the two scripts. Once dropped in, if everything is working, the applier scripts will run and delete the note card from contents. Thus the need for a copy in inventory.

Take the new applier HUD into inventory. From inventory attach the HUD via Attach to HUD. Any attachment point will work.

Click the ‘button’ and you should see your nails texture appear on your Slink hands and feet.

If that doesn’t happen, the primary mistakes are misspelling and forgetting to change permissions of the scripts to either COPY or TRANSFER.

Done

You have made your first Slink Nails Applier. That is it… but, you can do more.

Advanced

Adding Shiny

Second Life has a ‘materials system’. Using it we can make the nails shiny. The technical details of the materials system are here: Second Life’s light model for materials. To learn how to understand and make an image/texture for the specular map see: Specular Maps Tutorial (2013), which leads to a longer explanation and numerous examples.

For a quick solution, just create a solid white texture the same size as your nail texture, 32x32px for this test. White makes the surface shiny and black makes it matt. I made one of each and put in buttons for shiny on and off.

I’m using 32×32 to reduce texture load. If you want parts of your nail shiny and other parts matt, use a specular texture the same size as your nail texture. It makes it easier to create.

Revise the note card Slink Makeup Data – Test, in my case, to add the setup for the specular maps. Add a line like this:

Test1,NAILS_S,16b4334c-1fcc-cd60-ccdc-46f4febdb53c

Notice the ‘_S’, which tells the Slink script to send the texture 16b4334c… to the ‘specular’ layer of the nails. That is it.

You can see for this tutorial I used button Test1. In a more advanced applier HUD I use shinny on/off buttons with different names.

Adding 3D

The SL Materials System allows us to add fake 3D depth. We could add a jewel to the nail and have it appear to be on top of the nail and have some thickness. To do that we add a ‘normal map’. Making normal maps is beyond what I want to include here. So, if you want to learn about making normal maps/textures see: Second Life Normal Textures Tutorial.

If you have a normal map, adding it to the nails is easy. Add another line to your Slink Makeup Data note card and drop the revised note card in your applier HUD. The target layer is:

NAILS_N

The Makeup Texture Targets note card from Slink says to use “NAILS N” rather than “NAILS_N”. I haven’t tested but, I think it is a typo as the other cards all use “NAILS_N”.

Miscellaneous

You can build an applier with lots of nail textures. The Slink people think 50 to 70 textures, assuming they are 512x512px. The length of the button names affects memory use and reduces memory available for more textures. So, keep button names short.

You need a button for each texture and a line in the note card for each button.

You can revise an applier by changing the note card and again dropping it into the applier HUD. Rez the HUD on the floor, edit it, open the CONTENT tab, drop in the revised note card. The HUD eats the card in the process of updating. So, remember to have a copy of the modified note card in inventory. Take the HUD back into inventory and rename it or keep the name and delete the previous version.

There are script libraries with other scripts to make the HUD do other things; hide, close & detach, etc. You can make your HUD as fancy as you want.

Note

If you find mistakes or parts are hard to understand, please let me know in ‘comments’. Thanks.